Episode 338 - The Choreography of a Scene with Rene Gutteridge
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Rene Gutteridge discusses THE CHOREOGRAPHY OF A SCENE, including how to identify the purpose of every scene before you write it, where to enter a scene for maximum impact, how to balance propulsive moments with the quieter character-development scenes your story also needs, and why every element in a scene—from minor characters to setting—should be doing more than one job. We also talk about why so many manuscripts open with someone drinking coffee, and what to do about it.
Rene Gutteridge has been writing professionally for over twenty years, with projects spanning fiction, non-fiction, comedy sketches, novelizations and screenwriting. She is the multi-genre author of 24 novels plus several non-fiction titles. Her indie film Skid won deadCenter’s Best Oklahoma Feature, and her novel My Life as a Doormat was adapted into the Hallmark movie Love’s Complicated. She is co-writer on the feature film Family Camp, which was a Movieguide award winner and a Dove Award nominee. She is also a Screencraft finalist in true crime. Rene is co-director of WriterCon in Oklahoma City, senior contributor at Writing Momentum and is the head writer at 231 Collective.
Episode Links
Rene’s links:
https://www.renegutteridge.com
https://www.facebook.com/ReneGutteridgeAuthor
Matty’s Ann Kinnear Book 7 Serialization: https://annkinnear7serial.substack.com/
Summary & Transcript
What separates a scene that keeps readers glued to the page from one they skim past? According to author, writing teacher, and award-winning indie film producer Rene Gutteridge, it comes down to choreography—the deliberate, intentional design of every scene in your story. In Episode 338 of The Indy Author Podcast, Rene joined host Matty Dalrymple to break down what it means to truly be in the driver's seat of your scenes.
WHAT SCENE CHOREOGRAPHY ACTUALLY MEANS
For Rene, choreography is about designing a scene rather than letting the story carry you. That distinction matters because when writers allow a scene to drive itself, the result is often meandering—a scene that exists but can't justify its own presence.
Her go-to diagnostic question is deceptively simple: What is the purpose of this scene? If a writer can't answer that instantly—if they can't say what the scene does for the plot or the character arc—that's a signal to go back and look at it.
The test she applies is equally straightforward. Could you remove the scene and nobody would notice? Then it doesn't belong. Would removing it cause the whole book to crumble? Then you've got something worth keeping. The goal is to make every scene pass that second test.
WHERE TO ENTER A SCENE
One of the most common mistakes Rene sees—in beginning writers and experienced ones alike—is starting too early. Writers tend to wade through setup and warm-up before arriving at the actual moment the scene exists to deliver. The result is that readers have to work to find the reason they should keep reading.
Her advice: find the big moment in your scene, then back up just enough to give readers the context they need to understand it. That's where your scene should begin. Not at the beginning of the day. Not with waking up, getting coffee, and observing the weather—but as close to the moment that matters as you can get while still making that moment land.
Matty offered a vivid example from her own work-in-progress Ann Kinnear novel. The book opens on a cruise ship, and an early draft began with Ann going to meet her client—functional, but not gripping for a new reader. By adding scenes from the antagonist's point of view that show the inciting incident directly, the opening became what Rene called propulsive: it pulls readers forward rather than asking them to wait for something to happen.
BALANCING PROPULSION WITH THE QUIET SCENES
Propulsion doesn't mean car chases in every chapter. Rene addressed the natural follow-up question: what about the quieter scenes—the ones that let readers breathe?
Those scenes, she explained, are typically character development scenes, and character development is its own form of propulsion. In the first half of Act Two, a character who is causing problems for herself or others, second-guessing herself, or in denial creates emotional momentum even without plot fireworks. The reader isn't gripping the book with white knuckles, but they're still highly invested.
When a scene is unavoidably informational, the mandate is simple: make it entertaining. Rene's analogy was memorable—instead of a character simply driving across the country, ruminating the whole way, have the tire blow out and the grumpy gas station mechanic offer some unexpected sage wisdom. Find the thing that breaks the flatness and gives the scene a pulse.
MAKE EVERY ELEMENT WORK
The throughline of the conversation was a principle Rene stated directly: demand a lot from everything in your story. Characters, settings, and scenes don't get to just exist—they have to work.
A minor character isn't just there to deliver information. Her job is to reveal something about the main character—to push his buttons, expose his flaws, create conflict or discomfort. If she's not doing that, she doesn't get to be in the book.
Setting doesn't get to just be a sunset. It needs to add to theme, create context, do something beyond occupy space on the page.
Matty illustrated this beautifully with an example from her manuscript, where two separate scenes required crew members to be present. She realized she could make it the same crew member—serving both story purposes with one character—in a way that felt organic rather than coincidental. That, Rene said, is exactly the kind of thinking that turns good writing into a page-turner.
The payoff for this kind of thinking, Rene explained, is that readers never skim. Skimming happens when readers are hunting for the big moment because the material leading up to it hasn't earned their attention. When everything is working—subtext in the dialogue, possible clues woven into description, characters doing double duty—readers stay fully present because they never know what might matter.
THE COFFEE SCENE PROBLEM
No discussion of scene openings would be complete without confronting what Rene has seen in manuscript after manuscript: the opening coffee scene. Writers, she noted, learned long ago not to start in bed. So now they start in the kitchen.
The underlying principle hasn't changed, though: readers don't pay for a book to read about real life. They live real life. They know how to drink coffee.
Before cutting such a scene entirely, Rene recommends asking whether there's anything you can do with it—whether there's information or character development embedded there that could be transformed rather than deleted. The coffee scene doesn't always have to go. It just has to earn its place.
Matty's own in-progress solution was characteristic: instead of opening with Ann at home, she plans to move the home setting into a later scene, where Ann has her brother and his husband over for dinner outside, looking across the vineyard. The sense of place is preserved—but it's placed where it serves the story, not where it's simply convenient.
PLOTTERS AND PANTSERS BOTH TAKE NOTE
Rene closed with a note for seat-of-the-pants writers: the choreography approach doesn't require you to outline before you write. But it does require serious analysis on the back end. Writers who let the story carry them will need to work harder in revision to shape their scenes into something intentional. That work is completely doable—Rene herself wrote seven or eight books as a pure pantser before shifting—but it has to happen.
Whether you design your scenes before writing them or after, the goal is the same: scenes that know why they're there, enter at the right moment, make every element pull its weight, and leave readers with no reason to skim.
This transcript was created by Descript and cleaned up by Claude; I don’t review these transcripts in detail, so consider the actual interview to be the authoritative source for this information.
Welcome and Guest Intro
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Rene Gutteridge. Hey, Rene, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Rene: Hey, doing good.
[00:00:07] Matty: Rene is a multi-visit guest. This is her fourth appearance on the podcast. She was on pretty recently on episode 330, Writing Moments That Matter. That came about because, since Rene is a repeat guest, I had asked her if there was a fun fact that I and my listeners might not know, and that ended up taking the entire episode in a direction that we didn’t even anticipate.
We did absolutely tie it into writing. It was a fantastic conversation — really honestly one of my favorite conversations on the podcast recently — and it made me think I want to invite people that I love talking to and just say, “Hey, what do you want to talk about today?” and not plan anything. But we had a lovely topic planned for that recording, which we’re going to get to today.
For anyone who has missed those earlier episodes, just a quick bio. Rene Gutteridge is the multi-genre author of 24 novels and several nonfiction titles. She’s a writing conference director and an award-winning indie film producer, and one of her novels was adapted into a Hallmark movie. She’s a co-writer on the film Family Camp, which was a Movie Guide Award winner, and she’s also a ScreenCraft finalist in true crime. And if you want to see Rene’s entire very impressive bio, pop over to one of her many episodes.
What Scene Choreography Means
[00:01:26] Matty: So today we’re finally getting to the choreography of a scene, which I think — I think all our conversations come about because of something that pops up in a conversation. The choreography of a scene was something we had talked about in our next-to-last appearance that we wanted to dive into in more detail.
So Rene, let’s just start out — when you say the choreography of a scene, when you think about the choreography of a scene, what are you thinking of?
[00:01:53] Rene: What I’m talking about is that you as the writer are driving the scene rather than the scene driving you. You are designing a scene rather than just letting the story carry you along, because that’s when we get into meandering. We’re meandering through a scene, and we don’t really know why it’s there, and we know we don’t know why it’s there, so then we try to make it memorable or important, but we don’t really know what to do with it. So when I’m teaching scene writing, I like to teach it as designing scenes.
That means you have to plan it, you have to construct it. You’re looking at it logically first before you go into the creative parts of it. And when you approach it that way, then you are truly in the driver’s seat. One of the questions that I often ask writers when I’m working with them is a very simple question: what’s the purpose of this scene?
And sometimes they don’t know. You should be able to instantly answer that question. This scene does this for the plot, or does this for the character arc, or it’s there for this purpose and this purpose. If you don’t know and you can’t answer that question immediately, then you’ve got to go back and look at it.
[00:03:32] Matty: I think choreography might suggest to some people the idea of the physical movement of the scene — the physical movement of characters in the scene — but you’re thinking of it more as the thematic or the arc of the scene?
[00:03:48] Rene: I think it includes all of it. You’ve got to know why the scene is there. What purpose does it serve your story? And I ask writers often: if I think I could take this scene out and we wouldn’t miss it —
[00:04:03] Matty: Mm-hmm.
[00:04:03] Rene: If you can take the scene out of the book and nobody would know the difference, then it doesn’t belong. If you take that scene out and the whole book crumbles, then you know you’ve got an exquisite scene. And the goal is to try to make every scene important. It doesn’t have to be bombs, explosions, and dead bodies, but it should be a mix of plot movement and character movement. In there also is information — you should never have a scene just for informational purposes, but if you do, make it clever.
[00:04:44] Matty: Mm-hmm.
[00:04:45] Rene: Make it entertaining. So there’s that, and then there’s how we design it — if we’re thinking in terms of architecture metaphorically. You’ve got the cookie-cutter houses that all look the same, all designed the same. They flip the door from left to right or something. Or you get into a neighborhood where the houses are each unique. The thing you want to do is you want your story to look like one of those neighborhoods, where every scene has its own moment and character to it.
Purposeful Scenes and Variety
[00:05:30] Rene: And then we’re looking at where do we start the scene? That’s probably the thing that I work on most with writers — each scene should have an important moment, the reason that scene exists. Where do I start? I believe that’s where we were going in our last podcast when I brought up the thing that we ended up chasing.
But that’s the real question as you’re designing it: where do I start this scene? Most often, writers — who are just beginning, or even writers who’ve done a few books — seem to start too early. And then they’ve got a lot of stuff to wade through to get to the actual moment, and they try to make it really interesting with snappy dialogue and great description. So knowing where to start is a big key.
[00:06:40] Matty: I think the interesting thing here is that if you said all that and the word you were using was “story” or “book,” people are used to thinking about that. They might not have perfected it, but they’re used to thinking about that. But the idea of the choreography of a scene — I can’t remember what it’s called when you have a cauliflower and a little piece of cauliflower looks exactly like the whole cauliflower. Whatever that word is, it’ll come to me at three AM. But everything is like a macrocosm or a microcosm of the same thing — all the rules you have to think about for the success of a story are also the rules you have to think about for the success of a scene.
[00:07:25] Rene: Yeah, it’s true. And you do want variety — each scene serves something different, so each scene will look different. We’ve all read books where it’s four chapters of rumination in different locations, and you’re just flipping through trying to get to some action. So you want to try to put some variety in there, because that creates momentum. It keeps the readers on their toes. They don’t know what’s going to happen next. It’s the ebb and flow of a book. But each scene’s construction should be designed.
And what I find is that writers start at chapter one — especially seat-of-the-pants writers who just kind of start and go, “Where’s this journey going?” and let the story carry them. I think that’s the last thing you want to do if you want a page-turner.
[00:08:33] Matty: Yeah.
Propulsive Openings Example
[00:08:42] Matty: This is interesting in the context of the book I’m working on. I just finished the first shareable draft of my seventh Ann Kinnear novel — yesterday was a big day because I sent it off to my first valued reader. When I was working on that book at first, most of my books have several points of view, but as I was working on that one, it was all the protagonist’s point of view, which would have been the first book I had written entirely from the protagonist’s point of view.
And then I realized that there was a sort of secondary storyline that made sense. I added another character’s point of view. And then when I was nearing getting my first shareable draft ready, I realized that for people who are coming to book seven right from book six, the way it started might be fine — which is Ann Kinnear, who has a business consulting with people who want her to communicate with dead people, going to meet her client. I think that would be fine for someone who’s coming right from book six, but for someone who doesn’t know the character and isn’t getting any satisfaction from saying, “Oh yeah, I love her house, I love the place where she lives, oh we’re getting to see her brother again” — I don’t think it would have been that gripping.
And so I ended up adding — and I love this when a change you make actually addresses a couple of issues you know you have — I ended up adding a couple of scenes from one of the bad guys’ points of view, where you don’t know who the person is whose point of view it’s being told from. But rather than Ann meeting her client and the client talking about how he wants her to communicate with his dead father who died on a cruise ship, you actually see the death happening on the cruise ship.
And then when Ann’s talking about it, it’s not that the reader has more information than Ann, because it’s not an overt murder or something like that. But at least it’s more propulsive — especially for a new reader — than it would be if we were just seeing Ann going to the office, basically.
[00:10:32] Rene: It’s a great move. I think you used a perfect word: propulsive. We always want to look for propulsive moments, as many as you can put in. You’ll have those chapters — there are lots of names for them — where you let your reader breathe a little bit, especially if you’re writing suspense. You just need that deep breath chapter, which should also be significant in one way or the other. But that propulsion is something that you want to continually look for, and you made the right move there — you took something that was informational and put it into an actionable scene that we get to see, we get to experience.
Part of the beauty of books is that movies you are watching — you watch it — but books you experience. You’re in the moment with the character. And because of how much media we consume, as writers we tend to start writing our books like movies, where we can see the scene so we’re writing the scene, rather than sinking deep into the scene and letting our readers experience it.
So I would say great move, and congratulations on finishing the book.
[00:12:18] Matty: Oh, yeah. Well, I got it to my first reader, who always has some great input. This is interesting — I’ll probably do a podcast episode about this — I can tell exactly when I started the book because it was the first day of a cruise my husband and I went on in January. This is by far the fastest time it has taken me to get to a shareable draft, and I may share some thoughts about why that might be in a later episode.
Riding on a cruise is fantastic. I highly recommend it at least once for everybody. It was also fun because I based the ship in the book on the cruise ship we were on — changing many names to protect the innocent, since nefarious things happened on the ship. I would pull up the deck plans of the ship we were on and say, “Oh yeah, I’m going to call this bar something else.”
Deep Breath Chapters Done Right
[00:13:18] Matty: I like what you said about the rest scene — after action — because I think that when writers hear the advice to make your story propulsive, the tendency is to put a car chase in every scene, to have the volume at eleven for every scene. So can you talk a little bit about those scenes where on their own they may not seem propulsive, but they are necessary to the story? What are things that would make one of those more restful scenes — the deep breath scenes — intrinsic to the story?
[00:13:55] Rene: Those scenes are typically character development scenes. If you don’t actually have the plot moving things forward, it’s often where the character is discovering something about himself or herself, or is in denial — that’s always a fun one. We the reader understand; the character doesn’t yet understand. And character development really is propulsion too. You’re propelling the character forward, working on that arc.
If you’re in the first part of act two, typically your character is causing problems for himself or others around them. That’s where you want your character to be. If your character has all the answers in the first part of act two, you’ve got to figure that out. But the worse off your character is as a person, the more exciting the first part of act two will be. So if you’re in the first part of act two and what’s happening with your character is turmoil or second-guessing or whatever the issue is, those are the deep breath chapters where we’re not gripping the book, but we are still highly emotionally involved in it.
Sometimes you just have to have informational scenes — it’s just true. I’d be lying if I said it has to be sprinkled everywhere. You try to, but if you have to have an informational scene, then your number one goal is to make it entertaining, however you need to do it.
You’ll see it in different ways in movies and books. Here’s an example from a movie: you have to show the character getting from California to New York, and it would be strange not to show part of that road trip. Your character is in turmoil. They’re driving their old beat-up car. You could just show the car driving for a couple of minutes in the movie, or the character could have a blowout and have to stop at an old gas station where a cranky mechanic offers some sort of sage advice, and we get a little bit of insight into the character.
So in a book, the temptation would be for the character to ruminate the entire way from California to New York. If we were driving all that way, we would just be ruminating — especially as writers. But as you were saying about your book, what is the thing I can do to bring some sort of action into this that gives me what I want? The character could be thinking all these things, or the tire could blow out and the grumpy mechanic could somehow offer some sage advice. So when you’re looking at your chapters — especially on a second draft — and you’re thinking, “This is just one full chapter, 2,500 words of being in this guy’s head,” you maybe examine that and see what you can do.
[00:18:02] Matty: One way I can see that playing out in the book I’m working on is that Ann is sort of the only person on the cruise ship she knows — she doesn’t have allies. She’s alone on the cruise ship with 2,500 other people but a client who’s turning out to be maybe not as reliable as she thought.
There was a lot of rumination in an early draft, and then I realized that if I had her texting with her brother — who is also her business manager, and who is on land — that was fun because not only did it give her a chance to express the things she would otherwise be ruminating about, it also gave more opportunity for her to hear counter ideas, have some arguments, and think things through with him.
And it also introduced some good suspense, because the brother on land might be concerned about her, but there’s nothing he can do. Calling the cruise ship line and saying “I’m worried about my sister” would be overreacting. But it was another one of those cases where you solve several problems when you finally figure out the answer to one problem — it enabled me to create suspense where there wouldn’t have been any, and also got away from 2,500 words in the person’s head.
[00:19:21] Rene: Yes. Exactly.
Modern Communication and Scene Entry
[00:19:24] Rene: I always ask, when I’m reading somebody’s chapter and there’s a phone call between two characters, are they in the same city? Because if they’re in the same city, they need to be in the same room. You’ve got to get them knocking on that front door. Think about how often we see in movies — especially because they’re visual — somebody showing up at somebody’s front door unexpectedly. How often does that happen in real life?
[00:20:00] Matty: Yeah.
[00:20:00] Rene: Never. Nobody shows up at anybody’s door unexpectedly. But the reason for that in fiction is exactly what you said: if they’re not in the same city, texting is great because that’s a very modern form of communication. You can show that, and then it’s not ruminating. But if they’re in the same city, try to get them into the same room, because that’s really interesting if they’re arguing or whatever in the same room.
We like to experience that. It’s not always possible to get people in the same room. And I love the form of communication we get to show in writing through texting — it’s really fun, and it’s a different form of language. We write differently in texts. Writers know — we’re very proper.
[00:20:58] Matty: Yeah.
[00:21:00] Rene: We still put the periods on the end of our texts. But it’s a very fun form of communication that you get to explore, and it can really add some pizzazz into your story.
[00:21:13] Matty: It’s interesting — in an early book, let’s say a book that came out in 2015 or so, I had people texting and they were using a lot of abbreviations, like the letter U instead of “you” — all those abbreviations we used before the text app would provide the anticipated word. And now I’m always struggling with: to what extent are people using those kinds of abbreviations? To what extent are people putting or not putting periods on the end of sentences? Anything involving tech is always tricky because ten years later you might have to go back and fix it a little bit.
[00:21:54] Rene: You do, yeah. You’re absolutely right. Texting has evolved as well. I think the novelty of not spelling out your words is over because the phone spells it out for you. But it’s fun, and it’ll continue to evolve. Virtual conversations are going to be something we’ll be addressing — where characters look like they’re in the room. So all those things are going to be evolving, and we’ve got to figure out as writers how we best use them in our scenes to make them interesting.
And one point I wanted to add about writing scenes: I talked about earlier making sure to enter the scene in the right place. The question you need to ask yourself there is, what’s the big moment in my scene? And then you want to start as close to that as you can. So you find your big moment, and then you back it up just a little bit and get rid of what we sometimes call the warm-up. The warm-up is waking up, getting the cup of coffee, observing the clouds and the weather — those kinds of things — because we’re always wanting to start at the beginning.
[00:23:22] Matty: Yeah.
[00:23:23] Rene: But a well-constructed scene does not start at the beginning. You find your main moment and you back it up just a little bit, so that we have the information we need to understand the big moment.
[00:23:39] Matty: I think a way that people might interpret that — which I don’t think is what you intend — is: let’s say there’s going to be a long conversation that ends in a big blowup, and people might interpret your advice to mean just cut the buildup and show the blowup. But I think it’s about what’s the big moment and all the things that are attached to it. So you could have quite a long scene that’s going to end in a blowup, a long conversation that’s going to end in a blowup, and as long as that conversation is building to the blowup and not extraneous to it —
[00:24:18] Rene: That’s exactly right. A chapter is anywhere from 1,500 to 2,500 or 3,000 words, whatever. Obviously there’s got to be something in there.
[00:24:31] Matty: Yeah.
[00:24:32] Rene: It can’t all be the blowup. The point is that you don’t want to start at the beginning of the day, and then go find the conversation, and then go have the blowup. And that’s where the analysis comes in. If you have a long conversation that’s important, obviously that needs to be in there. Now, if you have a long conversation that is running 2,000 words, you may want to analyze that. That’s a long conversation
[00:25:07] Matty: Yeah.
[00:25:08] Rene: for two people, right? That becomes a talking-head moment. So analyze that. But sometimes you need it — you’ll see that a lot in legal dramas and that kind of thing. The best-constructed scene that I’ve noticed, and the one that I try to hit myself, is understanding your big moment and backing it up a little bit, because that’s usually character development right there, or informational development.
But you want to just sprinkle it all. You just want that fabric to be so tight that it’s hard to discern what’s plot development and what’s character development, what’s information sprinkled in — all of it. It’s just so tightly woven into the narrative that you can’t even see what the information is because it’s sprinkled and it’s gone. And the character development is there and it’s gone. And there’s dialogue and then there’s rumination, and then there’s information, then there’s a plot twist, and then there’s all the rest. And all of that is happening — in the best books I’ve ever read — as if it’s one thing.
Whereas when I first started writing, I wrote in segments. Okay, my information — I need to make sure I get that in. And then I need to make sure I get my dialogue in, and then my plot point, and then whatever else. I was thinking very compartmentally, rather than seeing it as one piece of fabric with all these threads. So now I really try to get it to flow — just so that it’s one piece. And the more you do it, the more you realize it.
I don’t know if you ever have this mental picture when you’re writing, but the sprinkling of the salt, the seasoning as you go through the description — it’s just that little bit of sprinkle of each thing that makes it really fun to read. So if you do have long pieces of dialogue, then you’re sprinkling in character development with inner monologue, or description that is symbolic and is going to come back later, whatever theme you get to see through description. There are a bazillion combinations of that.
But really, the point is that the target — the thing you’re going for — is that big moment. And then it should end there, because that’s your hook. You don’t answer it and you don’t tie it up. And then whatever you need leading up to that.
Make Every Element Work
[00:28:03] Matty: I’m always a big fan of any element that’s doing multiple jobs. I’m thinking of something like: if you are having a conversation between two people and the goal of the conversation is to share information with the reader and also for the characters to share information with each other, an example of what you’re talking about would be that the way those characters interact with each other says something about their character, their personalities. And the rhythm of their conversation suggests something about the rhythm of the story. Are they speaking in a way that indicates building tension? Are they speaking in a way that makes it seem like they think they have a lot of time that they don’t have?
I like doing this especially with characters — saying every character has to serve multiple purposes. For example, on the cruise ship I had Ann — let me see if I can make this make sense in the context of our conversation. She has to be let into the theater after hours, and so she meets up with a crew member outside the theater after hours, and he unlocks the door and lets her in. And for a while, that was just an anonymous crew member, but then later I had a scene where I had another crew member who needed to provide assistance of some kind, and I thought, “Ooh, is there an opportunity to have the person who provides the assistance be the same person who let Ann into the theater, without it seeming bizarrely coincidental?”
And it was. The fact of being able to have that be one person instead of two served another story need for me. So I think that idea of compartmentalization is: don’t think of each of those things as separate goals to pursue, but see how one of those things can support one of the other goals that might not immediately appear on the surface to be related.
[00:30:09] Rene: Brilliantly put. That’s exactly it. I always say demand a lot from the people working for you. So you don’t just get to be information — you also have to serve as character development. You don’t just get to be a character; you’re also going to deliver some information or some conflict.
If you have a 1,500-word conversation, you’ve got to make at least one of those characters difficult or weird or doing something. You’ve got to be entertaining, Cheryl. You don’t get to just sit there and be the secretary. You have got to do something weird, something uncomfortable. If Cheryl is an ancillary character and Bob is your main character, the only job of Cheryl is to bring out the character of Bob. You’ve either got to push his buttons, show his flaws, give him reason to explode, bring out his worst fears or insecurities. Whatever it is, Cheryl better be a workhorse or Cheryl doesn’t get to be in the book.
If you’re going to be in my book, you are going to work harder than you’ve ever worked in your life. Setting — if you’re going to be there, you’re going to do more than be a sunset. You are going to add to theme, you are going to add to context. Whatever you’re doing, you don’t get to just be setting. That’s really how I think about it — I look at all the components and I make them work very hard for me. And if they’re not working hard, they don’t get to be involved.
I probably sound like a harsh boss, but it does make everything very cohesive, and that’s really how you get a page-turner — when you’ve got things doing multiple jobs, because that keeps the reader on their toes. They’re not just reading a conversation; they’re reading subtext. They’re reading possible clues to something. They’re wondering what Cheryl’s deal is. So you always want to keep your reader on their toes so they’re never just skimming. You never want your reader skimming, ever. And once your reader skims, you’ve lost them, because what they’re doing when they’re skimming is looking for the big moment. And so if you need them to have this information beforehand, before the big moment, then you’ve got to make that highly entertaining.
[00:33:22] Matty: A scene from my book is popping into my head for each of these pieces of conversation. There’s a scene in the book where I need to introduce Ann’s brother’s husband. Ann has already been introduced, her brother has been introduced, but I needed to introduce his husband. So I had Ann invite her brother and his husband over for dinner, and they’re making dinner, and I had a sentence about the preparation of dinner: Mike grilled the steak, Scott made the salad, and Ann monitored the time that the baked potatoes were in the oven. Because I wanted to convey that Ann is not the person who is going to be making anything — the assignment she gets in her own home is to monitor how long the baked potatoes have been in the oven. I thought that was a fun way to drop in another hint about what she does and doesn’t do.
[00:34:09] Rene: Yeah.
Coffee Scenes and Final Takeaways
[00:34:10] Matty: But against that, I’m realizing that I violated the “don’t start at the beginning of the day” rule, because I did want to give something to return readers. The place where Ann lives has kind of become a character. And so for return readers, I wanted to give them a revisit of where she lives, and I’m realizing I’m doing that basically at the beginning of the first scene where she appears. She gets up, she drinks her coffee, she goes to the office.
[00:34:44] Rene: Yeah.
[00:34:46] Matty: If I just have her show up at the office but then leave the office and go back to her home — so I’m giving the reader that glimpse of her home but not starting with it — that’s probably a better way to construct that.
[00:34:58] Rene: Yeah. It’s so funny how I read lots and lots of manuscripts, and the number of times — I think we all learned that characters can’t start in bed. We all know that rule. And so now we’re all starting in the kitchen with coffee. We’ve actually gotten out of bed, but the number of manuscripts I read with the coffee drinking is just amazing. I think it’s because that’s how we start our day, and the one rule we’ve got to remember when we’re writing is: we are not writing a reflection of real life. Nobody wants to read about real life. We all live real life. I didn’t pay $12.99 for somebody’s book to read about my life. I know how to drink coffee. I know what it tastes like, and I don’t want to watch you drink your coffee.
So those are the things you catch on your second draft as you’re analyzing. It’s hard to recognize when you’re in the moment, because it makes sense and you have an idea of why it’s there. But when you go back and read and ask, “If I cut this, would this matter? Would anybody miss this?” — you might say no, or you might say, “Well, there’s this piece of information.” And I think that’s what you’re doing: there’s something important here, but I can place it 15 or 20 pages down the road just fine, and it makes everything move more swiftly. My first drafts are just full of all the mistakes I’m speaking of.
[00:36:50] Matty: Yeah. Our assignment is: everybody go search your manuscript and find the first reference to coffee, and hope that it’s not in chapter one.
[00:36:58] Rene: Absolutely. Here’s what I would challenge everybody with: sometimes, instead of just deciding to cut everything, the first question I ask myself is, what can I do with it? I teach a class where I actually use the coffee example, and I show it just as a normal coffee scene everybody’s written in their book. And then I show it again transformed — and maybe if you have me back, we might examine this, because it’s a very stark example of how you could do a coffee scene or what you could do with a coffee scene. I would always look, before you cut — unless it’s very obvious you don’t need it — and ask yourself, “Is there anything I can do with this scene that would be interesting?”
Because sometimes we want to start at the beginning of the day. This is how we want to introduce our character. So it’s not that it always has to be cut. You just want to see if you can make it a workhorse. You don’t get to just exist. If you’re going to drink coffee in my kitchen, you’re going to have to work for it.
[00:38:27] Matty: The reason I want a reference in there in some way is that Ann lives in a guest house in a winery next to a vineyard. I think people who are reading through the series will want some reference to that. I think it would be quite easy just to move the dinner she has with her brother and his husband to outside, and they can look across the vineyard. I only need a couple of sentences to accommodate what I think returning readers will want to hear. And I can drop that in. Unfortunately she’s on a ship for most of the time, so I only have a few opportunities to make a reference to where she lives. But I think it would be quite easy to just take that description and pop it quickly into another scene.
[00:39:12] Rene: You’re a great example, as we’re talking, of what kind of analysis it takes to build a scene. That’s where we want to be — analyzing before and after we write the scene. You really have to look at it from a good 30,000-foot view to see what it’s doing for you.
For the seat-of-the-pants writers that are listening, I don’t want to take your seat-of-the-pants writing away from you by any means, but just be aware that seat-of-the-pants writers will have to really work on the back end to get it all shaped up. It’s completely fine — I was a 100% seat-of-the-pants writer for many years, at least seven or eight books before I finally switched over. I’m about in the middle now. I do a fair amount of outlining, and part of that reason is that in movies you have to do it with your team. But just be aware that you are at great risk of letting the story drive you. So you will want to take that time for analysis at the back end.
[00:40:54] Matty: So Rene, as always, it is so lovely to talk to you. Please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
[00:41:01] Rene: I always enjoy people dropping by my website, renegutteridge.com. I can be found on Facebook at Rene Gutteridge Author. My Instagram is my personal Instagram that I don’t use much for writing, although my stories are pretty funny, so if you want to follow me on Instagram I put up some fun stories. Happy to hear from you anytime.
[00:41:26] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.